The Theater of Night

By Alberto Ríos

- Lehrer NewsHour to feature segment on Alberto Ríos’s poetry as it relates to the U.S.–Mexico border - paperback of cloth edition - cloth edition nominated for all major prizes and we are awaiting word - Ríos also known for his short fiction - Ríos represented in over 175 national and international anthologies and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music - “Ríos is arguably the best Latino poet writing in English today.”—Prairie Schooner

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619321458

Alberto Ríos

Alberto Alvaro Ríos is Regents Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe.

Book preview

ONE

Northern Desert Towns in the Turn of the Old Century

1

In town, in Cucurpe and Rayón,

In those small places and on those dirt streets

My grandmother walked with her sisters.

They were girls then, and could remember themselves laughing.

In those days there was a rabies for great civilization,

For suits, for Paris, for starch, for good grades, for musical societies.

People went to Saturday dances. Women wore their hair up.

Men walked with canes, fancy for walking but as much to hit the dogs

Biting at their capes—which the dogs thought

With all that black flailing in the summer wind

Was something attacking their masters,

The dogs having no understanding of civilized refinement,

Content themselves to walk on all fours

Unclothed, barking at will, and urinating in the neighbors’ yards.

2

The invisible wall between the town and the desert,

It was the dare of the town drawn as a line in the sand,

A dare against Nature and the sun, a dare against everything

The townspeople knew and imagined in the distance,

A dare as strong in its intent as the great barricades of history,

All those stories, all those walls and wire and water,

All those protections trying to raise themselves

Against the enemy, against the distant out-there.

But in a later century people would come to this place anyway

In shorts, sandals, and half-sleeved shirts.

The townspeople and the visitors would watch and nod,

Looking at each other. After all this time

The desert people marveled at the out-there

When it came in as it should from the sun.

3

The towns in the northern desert

Had taken care of themselves.

In the middle of the desert they bloomed

And a song came up

From them, sometimes, in the evening.

Smoke rose at dinnertime, and early light.

Rain and harvesting the corn

All meant something to the town.

When the electricity came, and the new lights,

The cars and the tourists,

Everything was different. Rayón and Cucurpe,

Magdalena and Imuris, all the other small towns,

They became old, like my grandmother and her sisters.

Together they waited to see what would come next.

The Mermaid Comb

He carved the hair comb out of a cow’s horn,

A mermaid comb imagined from stories

Given to all of us on star-filled summer nights

In the high desert. The sirenas, they were called—

The sirenas lived inside the water somewhere far away.

They were the opposite of us,

The way we lived without water on those mesquite hills,

These hills that were our waves, very slow

In the distance, slow but big in our ocean of air.

From beyond the horizon to the south,

From the old place that did not have a name,

Someone first brought a comb a little like this one

To be the great-grandmother of all those combs,

Those combs and their stories—

The stories were always about the girls who left

Then got lost, stories with always something of a sad look in the telling.

Nobody could say for certain about the existence of these mermaids,

So they lived very well here where we made a home for them

In our words and prayers, and on our bureaus.

But there was more.

There was the secret of the combs.

This was not a story told to us, nor one we told,

But we all knew it.

It told itself not with words but with small teeth.

I felt its bite sharply with my skin, with the small bumps

The comb raised, not just on my head but my body as well:

When I put water on my hair,

The mermaid came alive,

The comb of her tail moving like sure fingers

Through the moist dark of my loose strands,

Moving up and down, looking finally

For the topmost place to rest,

The place to stay and to see and be seen.

How else for a mermaid to behave?

And there is the matter of modesty,

Which in mermaids is not discussed

But everyone thinks the same thing—

They look and they breathe a little harder at what they see.

To wear this comb

Was to breathe a little harder, too.

When I went out like this, this comb in my hair,

I thought the sirena and her small chest looked like me.

I thought the carving looked a little

Like looking at myself in a mirror after a bath,

Those two curious paint spatters on my chest, those two

Flat, simple thumbs

Like the dark noses of two small dogs sniffing up

At dinner on the kitchen table.

Nights walking with this girl, this woman who looked like me,

In my hair

The desert—warm enough already—grew even warmer.

The feeling was a weight, not only on my head but on my chest,

Unbearable.